Five years since Game of Thrones wrapped up and fans still cannot move on from the terrible conclusion to the 8-season saga that made Sunday nights exciting. Despite the ham-fisted ending, the cast and crew believed in the story they told, with Peter Dinklage even blaming the audience for starting the backlash.
For eight installments, fans have been campaigning for their own favorite characters to land on the Iron Throne, with Daenerys Targaryen mainly leading this journey, so it was indeed a shocker to see Bran Stark become the king of Westeros.
Peter Dinklage Explains Why Fans Are Angry About Game Of Thrones
In an interview with Independent, actor Peter Dinklage addressed the public’s outcry over the upsetting finale of Game of Thrones.
People were just mad because nobody wanted it to be over. I know a lot of people were supposedly surprised by the ending, but if you paid attention, the clues were there.
The actor even jokingly added, “We told you not to name your dog Khaleesi,” because the character that Emilia Clarke played in the show was killed by Kit Harington’s Jon Snow.
Moreover, Dinklage echoed the same sentiment in a conversation with The New York Times: “I think the reason there was some backlash about the ending is because they were angry at us for breaking up with them.”
He remarked how most people spend their nights watching the show and they were furious that it’s now over. “We were going off the air and they didn’t know what to do with their Sunday nights anymore. They wanted more, so they backlashed about that,” he argued.
Dinklage asserted that they had to end the series because they had to. It was able to prove that the thing “the show was really good at was breaking preconceived notions” in the sense that villains became heroes and vice versa.
Game of Thrones Showrunners Reflect On The Backlash
It took a while before the showrunners broke their silence on the criticism they received. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, David Benioff lamented on the issue:
You always hope everyone’s going to love anything you do and it would’ve been great if 100 percent of people loved it, but they didn’t.
He admitted the outrage got into him, revealing one “can get so bogged down in public opinion that you spend your whole life googling things and trying to find people who felt one way or the other way.”
Dan Weiss, on the other hand, claimed even the positive feedback felt weird. “As soon as we went cold turkey — the last time I googled myself was in 2013 — the ambient stress level in our lives dropped by about 50 percent overnight.”
The famed HBO series propelled their careers to new heights, but the empire crumbled as soon as the show started deviating from the source. It is preposterous to blame fans for the lackluster ending when it could have been handled in a way that respects the characters and their arcs in George R.R. Martin’s books.
Game of Thrones is streaming on HBO.
